As recruiters, your primary aim is to provide quality candidates to your clients. Without it, you can’t even begin to dream of creating a high-performing team for them.

This means you not just have to take a closer look at your recruiting efforts but also make sure you cut down on repetitive manual tasks so that your undivided attention could be given to strategizing and implementing better hiring plans.

The chances of this happening without recruitment automation are nil.

What is Recruitment Automation?

Here’s a clear-cut definition for you. Recruitment automation is nothing but automation of most of your recruitment tasks. This involves automating candidate sourcing, candidate screening, resume parsing, interview scheduling, and more.

Agency recruiters worldwide have been focusing on adopting automation to streamline their recruitment efforts for three main primary reasons—

  • To meet their client needs in lesser time
  • To supply better quality candidates, and
  • To provide a positive candidate experience

If you look into this stat from Gartner, you’ll notice how 17% of organizations had used AI-based functionalities such as recruitment automation in their HR functions last year, and another 30% will do so in 2022.

Why are these numbers increasing with time?

This is primarily because most of these companies that had implemented this saved money and made more accurate data-driven decisions when it came to hiring.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of recruitment automation.

5 Major Benefits of Recruitment Automation

Recruiting nowadays is all about marketing your open job roles to suitable candidates and your services to clients in need.

To do this without any hassle, you’ll need to take care of your operational tasks. But does that mean you hire more people in your agency and burn a huge hole in your pocket?

Absolutely no!

This is where automation kicks in.

1. Saves Your Time

Recruiters spend about 13 hours a week trying to source candidates for a single role. It’s like one-third of their entire week.

This is time not well spent.

Adopting recruitment automation will save the time you spend on doing several manual and operational tasks. It’ll help you become much more productive and focus on implementing better recruiting strategies.

2. Your Quality of Hire Improves Considerably

There are two major KPIs that agency recruiters swear by— quality of hire and time-to-fill.

Quality of hire will determine the efficiency of the candidates in your client’s organization.

Imagine you end up hiring a candidate who looked good on paper but was a complete mess when it came to performance. The employee will churn out in a few months, and you’ll end up back in square one.

However, implementing recruitment automation can help recruiters hire candidates based on the qualities required for that specific job role. Especially during high-volume recruitment, when there’s a solid chance of you messing up due to an overload of CVs, automation can save you.

3. Your Time-to-Fill Reduces

Time-to-fill refers to the entire timeline of events in your hiring process, starting from the job posting to the candidate accepting the offer letter.

The average time to fill a position is somewhere around 42 days. Moreover, you cost your client money and time each day you leave a position unfilled.

Here are some of the processes you can automate to reduce time-to-fill—

  • Candidate screening
  • Resume parsing
  • Communication with candidates
  • Assessments

4. You End up Providing a Positive Candidate Experience

If there’s one major thing recruiters need to focus on in 2022, that’s positive candidate experience. We’ve even rounded up a list of tools that can help you with it.

When you automate significant parts of your hiring process, you’re freeing up your time that can be put to good use.

Building meaningful relationships and keeping your candidates up-to-date on hiring decisions can help you have a warm talent pipeline that’ll give you better results.

5. Mitigates Unconscious Bias

There’s no better way of getting rid of common hiring biases than recruiting automation.

Often, when you manually go through CVs, you might be unconsciously biased towards a candidate.

There are a lot of factors that can provoke this. To name a few would be— social stereotypes, cultural context, any form of personal experiences, background, religion, and more.

When you use recruitment automation, you end up being objective and analytical, thereby mitigating any form of hiring biases. This will, in turn, help your diversity hiring efforts.

A Few Use Cases of Recruitment Automation for Agency Recruiters

Here are a few ways by which you can implement recruiting automation for your agency.

1. Applicant Tracking System

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are used by agency recruiters to source, screen, parse and track the entire recruitment process. Major parts of your hiring process will get automated if you invest in an ATS that’s feature-rich.

Often agency recruiters make the mistake of buying an ATS tailor-made for internal recruitment. In this case, you might end up paying extra for a lot of features that you might never even use.

It’s therefore advisable to only go for a software that is specifically made with an agency recruiter’s needs in mind. For instance, Recruit CRM was continuously refined during its first few years after consulting nearly 2,000 agency recruiters across the globe.

2. Candidate Screening

The process of combing through ever
y CV manually is daunting. Instead, use workflow automation to help screen candidates quickly.

Based on the parameters that you set for your job posting, if your candidate meets the criteria, they will enter your database or get rejected by the ATS.

Imagine the time you’re saving here!

3. Chatbots

Many agency recruiters have started implementing chatbots on their websites to help pre-screen candidates and improve candidate experience.

Thanks to machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, chatbots can communicate with candidates and provide answers to frequently asked questions instantly.

Nowadays, many recruiters are implementing chatbots on their websites to decrease their website’s bounce rate. Smart, isn’t it?

4. Resume Parsing

Resume parsers can help save time and effort by parsing 100s of CVs in one go. A parser will extract meaningful information (just the data you need) from your candidate’s CVs and present it to you.

Make sure you invest in an Applicant Tracking System that comes in-built with a resume parser. This will help save some bucks.

Resume parsers maintain a standard format, have a reduced margin of error and let you have all candidate information in one single place. Talk about efficiency!

5. Interview Scheduling

Recruiters spend almost 2/3rd of their time in the interview process, and approximately 67% of agency recruiters mention that it takes 30 minutes to 2 hours to schedule a single interview.

This is honestly time-consuming!

Using recruiting automation to streamline this entire interview scheduling process can make your daily recruitment routine a lot easier.

6. Candidate Assessments

There are loads of candidate assessment tools available online. If your recruitment software doesn’t come with an in-built candidate assessment portal, you can choose services from platforms such as— VidCruiter, Vervoe, HackerRank, and more.

Here’s a detailed list of a few candidate assessment platforms that you can look into.

These tools automatically rank your candidates based on scores and are generally designed keeping a recruiter’s qualifications in mind.

Some of these assessment platforms might also integrate with your ATS, and you can even pull in the test results to your database, helping you make a rational decision for your client.

7. Background Checks

As per Wall Street Journal, 34% of all candidate application forms contain lies about experience, education, and ability to perform tasks outlined in the job description.

This somewhat proves why background checks are becoming increasingly essential for recruiters.

It doesn’t matter if you’re hiring freshers or experienced candidates, conducting background checks (might be one of the last steps of your hiring process) is essential. Missing out on this can cost you and your client money.

Automated tools such as HireRight, GoodHire, and Employment Hero are some of the software that can help you identify red flags in a potential hire. Here’s a list of the best background check software for recruiters.

8. Relationship Management Software

Successful recruitment is impossible without the proper nurturing of candidates. You might have a promising talent pipeline, but if you don’t keep in touch with your candidates and keep them engaged, somebody else will poach them from your recruitment agency.

Nowadays, most ATS’ comes with a CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) software. Make use of it to send warm emails, reminders, valuable and insightful content that’ll help instil trust in your agency.

You can even help them upskill by sending them curated online courses, conducting job interview training sessions, and more.

Using a CRM will also help reduce your cost-per-hire and time-to-hire.

Apart from these, automation can also help you—

  • Automate job postings across several job boards
  • Gather candidate feedback through automated surveys, and
  • Send offer letters as soon as a candidate accepts a job offer

If you think automation is going to cost recruiters their job, then you’re terribly mistaken. Instead, it’s designed to make your lives better so that you can focus on more strategic tasks at hand.

Recruitment agencies worldwide have started adopting automation to place quality candidates and win more clients.

From time management to productivity, it’s a boon for the industry.

In the comments below, let us know if your recruitment agency has already adopted automation this year.